Learning about learning

GETS SHARED!

I'm sitting in a Panera in Las Vegas away from the chaos of the strip wearing my ELearning BrothersT-shirt gathering my thoughts about DevLearn. For the uninitiated, DevLearn is a gathering of 3000 ELearning people sponsored by the ELearning Guild. As always, it was a conference full of great learning. It's awesome seeing my friends, many I only know thru Twitter, and being able to put a face with a name. What's even better is being with kindred spirits for a few days. Since moving to Illumina Interactive, I'm blessed to be with like-minded people with a unified mission every day, and was delighted to be able to attend with five of my colleagues. Our leader has great vision and it was genius to bring the core team together to learn. I'm looking forward to the debrief on Monday.

Here's what I learned this week.

dAY ONE: Adobe

My first day was a pre-con day focused on Adobe products. We saw what's upcoming with Captivate, and I'm pretty excited to see the advances in responsive design they are working on. There was a great demo using serving trays that showed how that worked. I understand the concept so much better.

STORYBOARDINGI went to a workshop on Storyboarding with Sarah Gilbert, who shared storyboards from Pixar and Martin Scorcese. She was demonstrating Adobe's Storyboarding app, Captivate Draft. It's and iPad tool that lets you create on the fly and use for demos for getting buy on. She also shared her process' which was in total alignment with the workshop I would be delivering the next day on the lessons we can learn from UX. She begins with a content map using a MindMap, then a content outline, sketches, wire frames, a mood board to show the colors and feel of the piece, then goes to prototype. There is huge value in this method, because you get signoff at each layer, allowing people to focus on specifics.

LESSONS FROM A STARTUPThe keynote opener was Dan Lyons, a journalist, who shared his gleanings of getting laid off at 52, then attempting to reinvent himself in a startup. He recognized that he knew a lot, but much of it would not serve him. He painfully realized this when he was hired at Hubspot, a classic startup learning to invent itself on the fly. It has all of the wonky elements we think of with this Google-esque culture and was a major contrast from the world of journalism. In particular, I loved their defining culture of having heart: people who are humble, effective, adaptable, remarkable and transparent. I tweeted his lessons learned and it resonated with many and is still being retweeted 4 days later.

MICROLEARNING & DESIGN HACKSI attended a workshop on design hacks and was amazed by the seamless transitions between the Adobe apps and products and the ability to carry things between them. I look forward to playing with those tricks. I also attended Ray Jimenez's session on Microlearning and realized how simply we can use story snippets for bite size learning. Workers are no longer interested in long, dedicated training sessions, I wonder though, how easily a snippet might get lost in email. I suppose if they are as startling as his example - a sleezy dude calling into a call center with inappropriate comments that froze at "What would you do?"then some choices would capture attention to make people wonder what was coming next and make then anticipate and open those emails to link to the training.

OVERALL A GREAT DAYOverall, I had a great day, and was jazzed for the next three days of DevLearn, continued in tomorrow's blog. Till then.... :)